The three prices, what each licence really permits, and the rules that decide how many you need. Written from licence audits rather than from a pricing page.
Microsoft publishes three prices for Business Central and almost nothing about the question that actually decides your bill, which is how many of each you need. This page is both halves: the list prices, and the rules that govern the count.
Reads anything, approves, updates existing records, raises a quote. Cannot post. This is the licence most people in an ERP should be holding.
The working ERP licence: finance, sales, purchasing, inventory, projects and warehouse. Anyone who posts a transaction needs this one.
Essentials plus manufacturing and service management. Essentials and Premium cannot be mixed in one tenant, so one requirement moves every full user up.
Microsoft list prices, checked by us on 2 September 2026, in US dollars, per named user per month. Microsoft’s price page is the authority — if it disagrees with this one, it wins, and please tell us.
This is the table people are really looking for when they search for the price, because the price per user means nothing until you know which of your people can sit on the cheap one. Read it as a floor: a person needs the leftmost column that covers everything they do, and one posting job a month is enough to move them right.
| What the person needs to do | Team Members | Essentials | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Read any data in the system | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Approve or reject a task in an approval workflow | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Update an existing customer, vendor or item record | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Enter and edit a timesheet on a project | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Create, edit or delete a quote | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Create a new customer, vendor or item | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Turn a quote into an order | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Post an invoice, a journal or a payment | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Finance, sales, purchasing, inventory and projects | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Warehouse management | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Manufacturing | — | — | ✓ |
| Service management | — | — | ✓ |
Entitlements are enforced by the platform, not by good manners. A Team Member account that tries to post a journal is refused by Business Central itself, whatever permissions an administrator grants it — which is why right-sizing licences is safe: you cannot quietly under-license someone and have it work anyway.
A licence belongs to one identified person. Two part-timers on one login is not a grey area, and there is no device licence and no concurrent-user licence in Business Central online — three storekeepers across three shifts on one scanner are three named users.
Reassignment is allowed when someone leaves, but Microsoft’s terms impose a ninety-day minimum holding period, precisely to stop one licence being rotated between people.
Microsoft’s licensing guide requires a separate licence for each user regardless of whether access is direct or through an intermediary application, a portal or a custom front end. Pooling fifteen people behind one service account and fanning them out through your own software is the case that clause exists for.
If someone offers to cut sixteen licences to one by putting a web application in front, what they are selling you is an audit liability with a user interface.
Your customers and suppliers may use an external-facing application over Business Central without licences. That is what makes a customer portal or a supplier order page viable.
Employees, on-site contractors and agents of your business are not external users, however the screen is built or wherever they sit. The test is who they work for, not which address they open.
Anyone quoting a per-user figure and stopping there is quoting a fraction. In a first year these lines usually matter more:
The add-on line is worth singling out, because it is where a front end often pays for itself twice: once on the licence mix, and again by absorbing two or three per-user subscriptions into software you own outright.
Not in the count — in the mix. Everyone stays licensed. The question is how many of your people hold an $80 licence to do work the $8 one covers, and the answer in almost every audit we have run is: most of them. They are on the expensive licence because opening the full client was the only way to reach their part of the job, not because the job needs it.
Twelve people moved from Essentials to Team Members is twelve times the gap between those two prices, every month, for as long as you run the system. That is the whole trick, and it survives an audit because nobody has been de-licensed — they have been correctly licensed.
The calculator on the savings page will put your own numbers against that in about thirty seconds, using the same list prices quoted above.
You can do all of this yourself, today, with nobody else in the room. It is also what we do in the first hour of a licence audit.
The ones that come up on the first call, answered the way we answer them then.
Per named user. Business Central online has no device licence and no concurrent-user licence. A shared terminal used by four people needs four licences, one for each person.
No. Licences are assigned to named individuals, and Microsoft’s terms impose a ninety-day minimum holding period before a licence can move to someone else — a rule written to stop one subscription covering two roles in rotation. Reassigning a licence when an employee leaves is fine.
No, and be careful with anyone who says otherwise. Microsoft’s multiplexing rule requires a licence for each user whether access is direct or through an intermediary application, a portal or a custom front end. What a front end can legitimately change is which licence each person needs — Team Member rather than Essentials — because it gives them a screen shaped for work that fits the cheaper licence.
Yes. Genuine external users may reach Business Central indirectly through an external-facing application without licences of their own. Your own staff and contractors cannot — they are not external users, whichever screen they use.
Read all data; approve or reject workflow tasks assigned to them; update existing records such as customers, vendors and items; enter project timesheets; and create, edit or delete quotes. It cannot post anything, cannot turn a quote into an order, cannot create new master records, and has no access to the manufacturing, service or warehouse modules.
Only if you genuinely run manufacturing or service management. It is not a general “better” tier, and you cannot buy it only for the two people who need it — Essentials and Premium cannot be mixed in one tenant, so a single requirement puts every full user on the higher price.
No. They are subscription list prices only. Configuration, data migration, training and integrations are separate, and in the first year they are usually the larger number.
A different licensing model with similar principles: named Full and Limited users, and the same multiplexing rule. If you are on-premises the arithmetic on this page does not transfer, but the audit does — ask us and we will run it against your own agreement.
Send us your user list and what each person does. You get a one-page before-and-after: the mix we believe you could be on, what it would cost, and what would have to change to get there. It costs nothing, and if you are already right-sized we will say so.
Book a licence audit